Since January, 2010, this blog has been dedicated to year-round coverage of the New York theater scene and, particularly, the annual Tony Awards race. The site features commentary on each production and its chances at nominations or wins, with keen insights into voter trends, leading to expert predictions.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Playbill Magazine has posted its spring preview to its website and, for those of you who have forgotten what's coming up (or, like me, who can't keep track of all the new productions being announced), the link to that is below.

I just read this article on the New York Times Website that I thought you'd all enjoy. I also like the idea of plugging some of the smaller theater companies in New York, which need our support now more than ever.

Jumping Out of Spider-Man’s Shadow
By IRINA ALEKSANDER
Published: January 26, 2011

IN a year when the star of the most talked-about Broadway show is a superhero in Spandex, it’s hard to fault other theater companies, on or off Broadway, for feeling a bit overshadowed.

“No, no, no, no,” said Barry Grove, the executive producer of the Manhattan Theater Club, one of the city’s major nonprofit theaters, when asked about the Spider-Man musical. “I hope people are talking about more than that.”
That, at least in part, was the purpose of the theater’s benefit on Monday at the Plaza Hotel, where board members and moneyed donors gathered for an evening of cabaret. The featured performers were Bebe Neuwirth of “The Addams Family,” Cheyenne Jackson of “30 Rock” and Steven Pasquale and Laura Benanti, the husband-and-wife actors who are veterans of the New York stage.
While guests sat down to dinner in the Grand Ballroom, the performers were stretching their vocal cords in a makeshift green room, a carpeted hotel room one floor above with a spread of fresh fruit.
Ms. Benanti and Mr. Pasquale, who said they have friends in the “Spider-Man” production, seemed conflicted about the show. “I think it’s a dangerous precedent to spend $65 million on a production because there are a lot of things that can be written and enjoyed for a whole lot less money and injury,” Mr. Pasquale said.
Ms. Benanti, dressed in a sequined, leggy black dress, added: “We live in the Twitter world, so you know when someone eats a muffin, but you don’t know what’s happening in Afghanistan. I think this is the trickle-down effect of that into the arts, which is really sad.”
A more diplomatic stance was offered by Mr. Jackson, who was corralled to the benefit by Robert Carlock, an executive producer of “30 Rock.”
“Anytime Broadway is being talked about on ‘Letterman’ and late-night shows on a daily basis, it’s good,” he said. He said that he plans to see the show whenever it opens.
Ms. Neuwirth, wearing a low-cut black baby-doll dress that showed off her lean, angled figure, was walking around with a miniature bottle of Champagne, sipping it through a straw, when a man with a headset came out and gave the performers a 15-minute warning. After each made a quick trip to the restroom, they took the elevator downstairs together.
“Did you all not get your bottle of Champagne?” Ms. Neuwirth, who was up first, asked the audience. She opened with cheeky show tunes, singing Liza Minnelli’s “Ring Them Bells.”
Mr. Pasquale sang an earnest rendition of “On the Street Where You Live” and introduced Ms. Benanti (“She is also my wife. Yay!”), who performed a song from her role as Claudia in David Leveaux’s revival of “Nine.”
Last up was Mr. Jackson, who said he would be performing a song from “Finian’s Rainbow,” which he was in last year. Two people in the audience clapped. “Ah, yes,” Mr. Jackson said. “That’s why we closed it in nine weeks.”

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Six-time Grammy Award winner Elton John, who won a Tony Award in 2000 for his score to Aida and has been nominated for three other Tony Awards, will be the subject of an upcoming biopic. The film's screenplay will be written by Sir Elton's Billy Elliot collaborator, Tony Winner Lee Hall. According to the article I saw on Broadway.com, the film will not be a traditional biopic but, rather, more like a Moulin Rouge type experience.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Theater Talkback: A Master Class With Christine Ebersole, a Singer of Many Voices

By BEN BRANTLEY

Ever since last Saturday night – well, around the time Saturday night turned into Sunday morning – I’ve been hearing voices. One of them is a clear, righteous soprano that recalls Joan Baez, the balladeer of my childhood; another is a lilting, silvery curlicue like that of the soubrette in an operetta from the gaslight era; then there’s the sassy “Hello, boys” trumpet of a girl singer with a big band; and, most hauntingly, there’s the glasslike voice that seems to exist expressly as a container for the shimmering pain within.
All those voices belong to Christine Ebersole, and she uses every one of them – and more – in her unmissable cabaret act at the Cafe Carlyle. I have long been an admirer of Ms. Ebersole’s versatility as a New York actress in musicals (and plays, too, but the subject today is song). Listening to the range of her technique packed into roughly an hour of performance time pushed my admiration into something like awe. The effect was like watching a master class with Laurence Olivier, in which the actor transformed himself, without stripping a gear, into a tragic Shakespearean hero, a seedy John Osborne down-and-outer and a fop according to Congreve.

Ms. Ebersole, I was reminded with renewed force, is a rarity among musical comedy stars. She is a genuine multilinguist, who sings fluently in the tongues of other times and places. Anyone knows this who saw her a few years ago in her Tony-winning performance in “Grey Gardens,” inspired by the sad and lonely lives of the Beale ladies of Southampton.
In that show, Ms. Ebersole portrayed both Edith Beale, the mother, in her early middle age (in the first act), and Little Edie Beale, the daughter, in her middle age (in the second act). And the transformation was achieved not only by makeup and costumes and (I presume) mind-set, but also by how each of those characters sang. Mama had a show-off soprano and Little Edie a nasal squawk. You could hear in those voices what these women had listened to all their lives and what sounds and recordings and personalities they had absorbed and were imitating and reacting against.
Now you might argue that Ms. Ebersole was just doing what we expect actresses to do: becoming another person. But in musical comedy – at least among its stars – such metamorphoses happen less frequently than you might expect. Among Ms. Ebersole’s contemporaries, only Donna Murphy shows a similar command in song of time-and-place-setting detail and inflection. (I rank Ms. Murphy’s performance in “Wonderful Town” with Ms. Ebersole’s in “Grey Gardens” as the most specifically realized character portraits I’ve seen in musicals.) Among stars of an earlier generation, at least the ones I’ve seen, only the ever-vital Angela Lansbury commands that particular range of skills. (Come to think of it, throw Ms. Lansbury in “Sweeney Todd” onto my list of meticulously defined musical portraits.)

This is in no way to denigrate other great musical actresses of the moment, a short list that would have to include Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Elaine Stritch and Kristin Chenoweth. (By the way, I’m focusing just on the gals right now; the guys are for another day.) But stars of musicals, for the most part, are like movie stars, in that we expect them always to have the same outsize personalities, with singing voices to match. (Carol Channing and Ethel Merman are the prototypes in this regard.) They tend to assimilate the roles they play into their big, thrilling stage presences, rather than losing themselves in the characters. And for this reason, they need to be carefully cast. (The peaches-and-cream Ms. Peters, a personal favorite of mine, seemed stranded in the role of the rough-hewn Annie Oakley in “Annie Get Your Gun.”)
What these women have in common with Ms. Ebersole and Ms. Murphy is an ability to make song feel like a privileged extension of speech: a means of distilling and magnifying emotions into a heightened state of clarity. And without that gift – which the extraordinary singer (and former Broadway ingénue) Barbara Cook is still practicing brilliantly in her 80s – all the technical virtuosity in the world doesn’t mean a thing.

That Ms. Ebersole has this gift of emotional expansiveness, too, was piercingly evident in her set at the Carlyle. In the show’s most wrenching moment, she sang “Another Winter in a Summer Town,” Little Edie’s elegy to a life that never happened (written by Scott Frankel and Michael Korie) from “Grey Gardens.” In this version, there was no trace of the Long Island accent or nasal twang or mother-resenting fury that Ms. Ebersole had used in the Broadway version. Instead, Ms. Ebersole filled the room with a pure incandescent sorrow that somehow seemed to belong to everyone.
Who do you think possesses the gifts I’ve attributed to Ms. Ebersole? I mean among stars past, present and possibly future. Sutton Foster, who’ll be appearing in “Anything Goes” this season, is a possible contender. In any case, I’d love to see this list expand.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Jim Belushi and Nina Arianda will be coming to Broadway in a season with more late-announced new arrivals than any I can remember in recent years. They will be landing on the main stem in a revival of Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday, which will begin performances at the Cort Theatre on March 31st in anticipation of an April 24th opening in a production to be directed by Tony-Winner Doug Hughes. The play originally opened on Broadway in 1946 and was made into a popular film in 1950 that won Judy Holiday a Best Actress Oscar.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The current Broadway revival of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest has extended for an additional 17 weeks beyond its originally planned limited run. The show was originally scheduled to close on March 6th, partially to make way for the Donna Murphy vehicle The People in the Picture, but will now close on July 3rd. Audience and critical reception has, apparently, been quite strong, with critics loving the show and the house filling up to a 95% average attendance since the show opened on January 13th. To accomodate the change, Murphy's show will now perform at Studio 54 rather than at the American Airlines Theatre.

Monday, January 24, 2011

WHEN you write one of the most produced plays of the decade at the age of 30, you can presumably shift your focus to whatever you want. But for David Auburn, who earned that distinction (on the basis of subsequent professional stagings) with his 2000 play, “Proof,” a chunk of the last 11 years has been spent doing what others have asked him to.

Some of these jobs were no-brainers, like the screenplay for the film version of “Proof.” Others had a neat symmetry, like the revision of “Tick, Tick ... Boom!,” an autobiographical musical by Jonathan Larson. (Each won the Pulitzer Prize for drama as well as a Tony Award while in his 30s: Larson posthumously in 1996 for “Rent,” Mr. Auburn five years later.)

And now there is “The New York Idea,” which Mr. Auburn described as a “gut renovation” of a long-forgotten Langdon Mitchell comedy of manners set in Washington Square. A sort of madcap gloss on “Private Lives” filtered through Edith Wharton and Clare Booth Luce, Mr. Auburn’s version of that 1906 play will open Wednesday at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Commissioned by the Atlantic Theater, “The New York Idea” is perhaps the least intuitive choice yet for Mr. Auburn, now a 41-year-old father of two.

“There’s no plan,” he said of his somewhat curious career trajectory. “Some interesting things came along, and I took them on.” At a Vietnamese restaurant across the street from the theater, Mr. Auburn, solidly built and still boyish looking, answered questions cautiously but not disagreeably, with the unhurried composure of a man who can afford to do anything that strikes him as interesting, and nothing that doesn’t. It’s hardly unusual these days for youngish playwrights to spend blocks of time away from the stage and in the lucrative land of cable television. And Mr. Auburn is making his first foray into that field with a pilot for HBO, about a Claus von Bülow-esque surgeon (played by Kevin Kline) acclimating to the outside world after serving a prison sentence for murder. There have also been a handful of film projects: “The Girl in the Park,” which he also directed, and the Sandra Bullock romance “The Lake House,” along with a few unproduced screenplays. But during this time his stage output has consisted of a pair of one-act plays at Ensemble Studio Theater; a one-man adaptation of the World War II journals of the Romanian Jewish author Mihail Sebastian, which the Keen Company produced Off Broadway in 2004; and a handful of directing jobs, including a well-received revival of Edward Albee’s “Delicate Balance” at the Berkshire Theater Festival last summer, and coming in May, a new Michael Weller play, “Side Effects,” at the MCC Theater.

“I would like to be quicker and more prolific, but the process is the process,” he said. Of the various adaptations and commissions, he said, only “The Journals of Mihail Sebastian” qualified as what he called a passion project. “Those journals had affected me strongly, and it was a time right after ‘Proof’ where I thought: ‘This is a particularly good time to do something that has virtually no commercial potential. Take myself to Romania, buy the rights to this thing — when else will I have a chance to do that?’"

“The New York Idea” would appear at first to be similarly uncommercial. With its once-and-maybe-future married couples, its sassy servants and its mortified older generation, the play basks in both its modernity and its old-fashioned construction. (Mark Brokaw, the director, described its subtext as “Washington Square defending its gates against the interlopers.”) Mr. Auburn isn’t above tossing into the mix the occasional dig at that era’s self-conscious iconoclasm. “I am for complete equality between the classes and the sexes,” Vida Phillimore, the play’s main provocateur, pronounces. “The races I am still considering, but I expect to make a rather startling decision shortly.”

Neil Pepe, artistic director of the Atlantic, said his theater prided itself on linking playwrights with less-than-obvious material. “Habitually people sort of ‘niche’ authors, whether it be David Mamet or Lanford Wilson or David Auburn, when in fact they have much wider interests,” he said. “David is incredibly technically skilled, with a dry sense of humor and an acute ear for storytelling. That’s particularly important with something like this that needed a bit of tightening.” Both he and Mr. Brokaw agreed that the revisions were extensive; Mr. Pepe called the resulting work “more muscular.” A few minor roles have been winnowed out (though the dozen remaining characters feel decadent by today’s budget-conscious standards), and certain plot threads now weave through the play far more consistently. “I had a feeling of freedom with this one because I didn’t feel that I was violating a sacred text,” Mr. Auburn said. “It’s really not revived. And not to disparage Mitchell’s work, but if you read the original, you’ll see why it’s not revived.” He said the biggest change to his newly “efficient comedy machine,” as he called it, was not structural but ideological. The play’s title comes from a tirade by one of the husbands, a potential jiltee: “The New York idea of marriage. Marry for whim and leave the rest to luck and the divorce courts.” The character’s and the author’s derision comes across strongly in the original text.

“I think Mitchell wrote it with a kind of polemical purpose in mind, which was to warn against the dangers of the too-available divorce, and that theme didn’t appeal to me,” Mr. Auburn said. “But what does remain is this idea that this is a rigid, rule-based society where one of the rules is changing rapidly.”

Mr. Brokaw took cast members on field trips to the Players club (formerly the private home of Edwin Booth) across from Gramercy Park and Grace Church to soak up some of the early-20th-century atmosphere, but Mr. Auburn’s research was confined largely to the bits of Wharton and William Dean Howells he had floating around in his head.

And, of course, the original play. Mr. Auburn’s career, as it happens, is not so dissimilar from that of Langdon Mitchell. “The New York Idea,” which was extremely popular in 1906, is surrounded in Mitchell’s bibliography by adaptations and translations, notably “Becky Sharp,” his take on perhaps the pre-eminent comedy of manners, Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair.”

But Mitchell fell in with the husband-and-wife team of Harrison and Minnie Fiske, the director (Harrison) and the star (Minnie) of the original “New York Idea,” whose heated battle with the monopolistic Theatrical Syndicate resulted in their being blackballed from many choice theaters. By contrast, Mr. Auburn’s scarcity over the last decade seems to have made artistic directors like Mr. Pepe and Lynne Meadow, whose Manhattan Theater Club presented the premiere of his hit play — a mystery about a mathematical proof — more desirous of his return. “We’ve been in constant contact since ‘Proof,’ ” Ms. Meadow said. It appears that she will soon get her wish. “The Columnist,” Mr. Auburn’s look at the 1960s through the eyes of the increasingly hawkish newspaperman Joseph Alsop, has been penciled in for next season at Manhattan Theater Club. Incidentally, Mr. Auburn’s previous go-around with the theater, the one that put him in a position to pluck an obscure comedy out of mothballs or adapt wartime journals or just spend time with his two girls, came about when the script department brought him to Ms. Meadow’s attention. The original plan? To put him to work on a science-theme play — with a commission.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Kathleen Turner has been confirmed for a return to the Broadway stage. It has been announced that she will star in High, a new play by Matthew Lombardo (the playwright behind last year's Tallulah Bankhead biography Looped). This production will be directed by Rob Ruggiero, who also directed Looped. The production will begin previews on March 25th in advance of an April 19th opening.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge has died at the age of 78. Known for her love of purple and for her designs on Annie, Dreamgirls, and A Chorus Line, the three-time Tony-Winner also won an Oscar in 1975 for her design of a film version of The Great Gatsby. She is survived by her husband, actor Tom Aldredge, to whom she had been married since 1953.

Comedian Russell Brand has been reported as a potential star of the previously announced film version of Rock of Ages. Brand would play Lonny, the show's narrator who runs the club where the show's central action takes place. This is the latest in A-List casting rumors surrounding the film adaptation, after reports that Alec Baldwin, Taylor Swift, Mary J. Blige, and Tom Cruise have all been reported to be in serious talks to star in the film. Other A-Listers like Seth Rogen and Gwyneth Paltrow have expressed interest in working on the film.

This article by Charles Isherwood appeared on the New York Times website yesterday and it got me thinking about the issue of rock music on Broadway. What is its place? Does it even have a place? Musical Theater scores are, I would think, written (to a certain extent) to be singable by a large range of people to accommodate casting changes, as well as revivals et al. But rock, until it invaded Broadway, was often written for a particular voice -- one specific person's talents. Lots of stuff going on here. Let me know what you think.

Rock is mostly retro on Broadway, where the jukebox musical has taken up firm residence. The notable exception is “American Idiot,” which received a heady injection of pop excitement this month with the return of Green Day front man Billie Joe Armstrong to the role of St. Jimmy. (Of course, rumor has it there’s a score for some new show by a rock band called U2, but I haven’t heard a lick of it yet. Some distant day, perhaps.)

Now comes word that Melissa Etheridge will slather on the eye makeup and take over Mr. Armstrong’s role during a week of “American Idiot” performances beginning Feb. 1.

The news inspires a little trepidation. Broadway already has something of a reputation as a rehab center for established (or aspirational) movie stars looking to recalibrate their careers when the big offers are not on the table. Will it now perform a similar function for rockers absent too long from the charts? The signs are there: Dee Snider, the lead singer of the 1980s hair band Twisted Sister, appeared in “Rock of Ages.”

As a big fan of “American Idiot” I can only hope the show doesn’t become a revolving door for the kind of thoughtless celebrity casting that made the great “Chicago” into something of a running gag for a while. (Next up: Justin Timberlake!)

I’m not set against the idea of a woman taking over the role of St. Jimmy. The character has distinct similarities to the Acid Queen from The Who’s “Tommy,” after all. And as played by the terrific Tony Vincent in the original cast, St. Jimmy was intriguingly androgynous. Ms. Etheridge certainly has real rock bona fides. But she does strike me as a more down-to-earth presence than the flamboyantly sinister role of St. Jimmy would seem to require. The female rocker who comes to my mind would probably be somebody like Joan Jett, who wouldn’t even have to adjust her look much.

The real issue is the matter of integrating a particular performer’s energy and style into an already conceived role. Many rock stars are great live performers – that’s pretty much a requirement of the job. And they are often enacting highly stylized roles that are distinct from their everyday personalities. When he struts onstage with his distinctive stomp and aggressive pout, Mick Jagger is definitely acting, on some level. But he’s not playing a character written and conceived by somebody else, a craft that requires entirely different skills.

David Bowie has been more of a chameleon over the years, reinventing his onstage persona to suit new eras in music. Yet it may be telling that while both have tried their hands at film roles here and there, neither Mr. Bowie nor Mr. Jagger made much of a splash, despite their immense popularity. You could say the same of Sting, who appeared in a few movies in the 1980s and even made a foray onto Broadway, playing Macheath in a revival of “The Threepenny Opera” (to no great acclaim). So, for that matter, did Mr. Bowie, who took over the title role in the original Broadway production of “The Elephant Man” for a few months. Neither Mr. Bowie nor Sting chose to repeat the experience.

I will admit a curiosity about what impact the reigning pop queen Lady Gaga might have in a Broadway show. She was among the suggested performers named by readers when the news of Ms. Etheridge’s casting in “American Idiot” was announced. (As was Ms. Jett.) And yet it is hard to conceive how Lady Gaga’s meticulously manufactured stage persona could fit into even a show as highly charged as “American Idiot” without turning it into a vehicle for her own outsized personality. She doesn’t strike me as a performer who has any interest in playing a role other than the one she has carefully honed to maximize her talents.

The example of Madonna naturally springs to mind here. She made her career by enacting a series of evolving personas, from scrappy street kid to debauched virgin to domineering seductress. When she appeared on stage and in movies, Madonna creditably attempted to subsume her personality in to the role at hand, but mostly the charisma evaporated. The only role in which she truly bloomed with authentic life onscreen was in “Desperately Seeking Susan,” when she was quite clearly playing a variation on her (current) self.

Ms. Etheridge, of course, does not possess the kind of lavishly conceived persona that would need to be jettisoned so she can fit into an ensemble cast. She may turn out to be terrific in the role. But history suggests that the role of rock star and the role of working actor (on the stage or in movies) can rarely be played wholly successfully by the same man or woman.

Let me know if you agree or disagree, and whether you think any rock and pop performers would or could be an ongoing asset to Broadway, or a liability.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

The girls over at the Broadway production of Priscilla Queen of the Desert will be meeting on January 24th to record their cast album in anticipation of a March 15th release. The show will begin previews on February 28th in advance of a March 20th opening. The show uses a large number of popular dance hits that will be included in the cast album, including I Say A Little Prayer, It's Raining Men, and I Will Survive, as well as other numbers by Elvis, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Tina Turner.

I just read a wonderful review for an Off-Broadway production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline and I enjoyed it so much that I just had to share it with you. I know this production is not on Broadway and, thus, cannot qualify for the Tony Awards, but there was no way I could avoid sharing this with you once I discovered it. Follow the link below to enjoy.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Rock star Melissa Etherage, no stranger to Broadway's version of rock 'n' roll after her on-stage jam session with the guys over at Million Dollar Quartet, will be joining the cast of American Idiot for a week. Ethridge will take on the role of St. Jimmy, currently being played by Green Day front man Billie Joe Armstrong, while Armstrong is on vacation from the show. Ethridge will be in the show from February 1st through 6th, after which Armstrong will return to the show for another three weeks. Though the character of St. Jimmy is considered to be the alter ego of the main character (a young man rebelling against Bush-era politics), the gender switch doesn't call for much change to the show. Michael Mayer, the show's director and one of its book writers, has said that "Billie Joe and I always believed that it would be incredible to have a woman take on the role of St. Jimmy. This character is seductive, thrilling, and dangerous. Melissa Ethridge is all that and so much more."

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

A celebration of the life of late composer Jerry Bock is set for 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 24 at the American Airlines Theater, with a lineup of speakers and performers including Harvey Fierstein, Harold Prince, Chita Rivera and Bock's longtime tuner-writing partner, lyricist Sheldon Harnick.
Bock, who died Nov. 3 of complications from a stroke, composed a string of musicals including 1960 Pulitzer-winner "Fiorello!," "Fiddler on the Roof," "The Apple Tree" and "She Loves Me."
Helmers Austin Pendleton and Lonny Price, producer Stuart Ostrow and performers Barbara Cook, Boyd Gaines and Hal Linden also are due to appear at the event, which will be staged by Michael Montel.
Event is open to the public on a first-come, first-serve basis. American Airlines is one of the Roundabout Theater Company's Broadway venues.
by Gordon Cox, Variety.com

Monday, January 17, 2011

I know it seems a bit early to be posting a second set of predictions so close on the heels of my first set (only about a month apart) but I have really done some digging into the spring season to make sure I'm covering every show that's planning to open -- and boy are there a lot of them. A whole bunch of shows have been announced in the last month, with details of previously announced shows becoming increasingly available over the past few weeks. So, without further ado, here are my updated picks for the 2011 Tony Awards.